Three Apples articles

Your face has changed. It’s fuller now. Your five o’clock shadow has disappeared. Your hairline has receded. And the decades you’ve lived are recorded in the wrinkles on the back of the hands you’re washing.

… a moon so large in the Angelino Sky that I could clearly see the red underbelly of a Southwest jet flying over me, out of the Burbank Airport and into the future. On this first Sunday of October, the moon was so close that I could touch her wrinkles. I knew God had put her there just for me, so that He would illuminate the humdrum, drab, artless, and uninspired set of my midlife feature film.

Last Sunday I stood a foot from my TV flipping channels to find local news coverage of the protest rally at Pelanconi Park in Glendale. Instead of a story about ten thousand Armenians gathering there were stories about Roman Polanski’s arrest and Yom Kippur services.

The 1978, hand-me-down, brown, nerdy Chevy Impala I drove my freshman year at the university of spoiled (or smart) children was bigger than my off-campus room, so packing everything I had brought down to school and return home to Fresno for the summer was effortless.

What I hope is the last bill from a 30-minute visit to a Burbank hospital a few months ago arrived in the mail this week. My cost for the emergency room visit was around $2,500, which is an average annual salary in Armenia.

“Go back where you came from,” said the elderly man entering the auditorium to see the Red Army Choir perform. It was 1989, and I was on assignment for Horizon Armenian TV, reporting on why Armenians were protesting the performance.